


offer your heart (or what's left of it)

by kadotoriku



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, Depressed Eren Yeager, Gen, Introspection, Ocean, Shingeki no Kyojin Chapter 90: To the Other Side of the Wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25989118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kadotoriku/pseuds/kadotoriku
Summary: He locked up the small voice doubting its existence and built the very foundation of his soul on the goal of reaching it before his life’s end because when they reach it, the Titans will all be exterminated and the world will be theirs to explore.Now, facing the actual ocean, he can’t help but feel like he’s played himself.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 61
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	offer your heart (or what's left of it)

Stripped down to their cores, love and anger aren't all that different.

They're both driven by conviction, by fierce emotion, by _passion_. They're not each other's opposites, rather, Eren sees them as complementary. Two halves of a whole.

If anything, their opposite counterpart is apathy.

A lack of drive, indifference. A cold detachment that stems from exhaustion, planted by the seeds of hollowness in one's chest. A foreign plague that burrows itself into one’s heart and stretches outwards to every other part of the body.

Months ago, he'd jump at the chance to dive into the crystal waves of the sea, to peer into holes in the sand for exotic creatures, to float atop the salty water and trust in it to whisk him away to a beautiful faraway land.

The actual thing is... anticlimactic. Eren can't find it in himself to marvel at the softness of the sand beneath his toes as he walks towards the horizon—towards the outside world, towards their **_enemies_**. He's lightheaded and doesn't know why, his bones weighed down by a phantom feeling of fatigue. The picturesque scene would be breathtaking any other day, but he can’t muster the energy to so much as smile at it.

The afternoon sun shines above all of them, no longer an ominous harbinger of death that rejuvenates the ravenous Titans with its light. Its heat blankets him and contrasts with the cold seawater lightly brushing against his feet. An oddly satisfying fizzy noise reaches his ears when the passing wave foams into the sand and its body recedes back into the sea.

Waves crash onto the shoreline, powerful arcs descending into small trickles as they approach land. Distantly, he can hear Hange’s joyous screams at something they found, Jean spluttering from the taste of salt on his tongue, and Armin’s soft noises of amazement and disbelief that they’re actually _here_.

Eren’s head is numb, the laughter of his friends and comrades like distant echoes. Only a few inches above the balls of his feet are submerged yet he feels like he’s underwater, the world filtered through thick layers of murky water and a never-ending void.

It’s suffocating. He should be happy, should be reveling in the ocean’s sparkling visage, should be playing around and acting like his own damn age ( _he’s_ _only fifteen, a teenager, a kid still developing—_ ), but he...

He **_can’t_**.

Exhaustion has long pinned him down and locked away his ability to ignite the burning fire that once fueled his every move. It feels like such a long time ago that he was an overflowing fountain of hot and vicious flames of uncontrollable emotion, that he was a stubborn force of nature willing to do whatever it takes to snuff out evil, that he was a symbol and source of hope and liberation.

There’s no drive within him to childishly splash around the water, not when it’s at this very place did innocent people get forcibly transformed into flesh-craving beasts. There’s no part of him willing to pretend that there isn’t a thriving world out there that left them ( _the subjects of Ymir, the people of Paradis, fellow living and breathing **human beings**_ ) in the dust, biding their time to wipe them all off the face of the earth for merely existing.

Eren used to cling onto the ocean as the emblem of freedom. A vast, bottomless lake with an endless supply of salt? It sounded like a dream, a foreign concept that’s completely unheard of. He locked up the small voice doubting its existence and built the very foundation of his soul on the goal of reaching it before his life’s end because when they reach it, the Titans will all be exterminated and the world will be theirs to explore.

Now, facing the actual ocean, he can’t help but feel like he’s played himself.

He deluded himself with hate and anger and vengeance, allowed himself to be blinded by idealistic hopes and dreams, and he never thought to stop and wonder if the fighting, the deaths, the war, the _bloodshed_ will truly end with the fall of the last Titan.

There’s still more conflict to come, a continuation to this cycle of destruction. Eren wonders if it’ll ever truly end.

_Is there a way to make it end?_

“See? I told you Eren.” Somewhere far behind him, an entire world away, he hears Armin’s awe-striken voice. “That there's a giant saltwater lake, that no merchant can deplete, not even in a lifetime. What I said... wasn't wrong, wasn't it?”

_No, no, it wasn’t wrong. It never was. When have you ever been wrong?_

“It’s so... big,” is Eren’s soft reply. It’s barely audible, even to him, his words swept up by the ocean breeze and broken down by the waves creeping up towards his knees.

"Yeah. Hey, Eren, come see this!” Armin’s words are colored by a bright, warm light, and Eren wants to preserve that—that optimistic curiosity, that hopeful tone, that voice belonging to a person a million times better and more deserving of the good things in the world than Eren.

He wants to lean into the excitement, be swallowed up by the happiness, join in with the carefree laughter, but apathy has long festered inside his very being and bound him to reality. He’s afraid that if he allows himself to ascend to the level of the heavens, he’ll mercilessly thrown down as punishment for wasting his energy on something he does not and will _never_ deserve.

Not until they’re **_truly_** free.

“On the other side of the Wall—‚”

“—Is the ocean, and on the other side of the ocean is freedom.” Eren’s voice sounds strange, unfamiliar even to himself. His monotone way of speaking nothing like the fiery way he would preach those words to anyone in his vicinity. Yet he can’t bring himself to _care_. “We believed that for so long...”

His eyes ache from the effort of trying to cry without strong emotions to back it up. “But it's not true.”

Bits and pieces of visions pass through his mind, grim reminders of the true nature of the world they live in. He turns in the direction of his friends (his _family_ ), and wonders if it’ll be possible for all of them to settle down in peace. “What's waiting for us on the other side of the ocean is the enemy. Everything is as I saw it in my father's memories...”

“Right?” he says in a hushed whisper, perhaps a bit in disbelief that this all isn’t a construct of his own dark mind, that the world is _indeed_ fucked up enough to demand more suffering from traumatized humans, that true freedom may not even be _attained_ in his lifetime. Eren points towards the meeting place of the sun and sea, the horizon that falsely promises paradise and gives them glorified prosecution. “So if we kill the enemy, the one waiting for us on the other side...

“Will we _finally_ be free?”

**Author's Note:**

> Filled for the [Negativity] square on my Banned Together Bingo 2020 card because... well, Eren isn't exactly a ray of sunshine here.
> 
> Okay so I dropped the AOT manga years ago (around the reclaiming of Shiganshina arc) but jumped back into the fandom when I reread a few Titan!Eren fics and caught wind of Eren’s grandiose endgame in the manga. I love to cherry-pick canon so excuse any errors here.
> 
> This is a sort of vent fic because Eren is—ugh, let me tell you that it broke my heart when he couldn't muster the will to so much as smile at the ocean. I can relate to his emptiness and apathy, and I _understand_ why he turned from a fiery, headstrong kid-bordering-a-brat to a scarred, selfish self-proclaimed messiah. His character arc is a work of art and I love him a lot and can talk about him all day every day.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading this unedited piece, please feel free to comment on your way out. <3


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